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Back The Great Pretenders
Chapters (55)
  1. Cover
  2. Praise for The Great Pretenders
  3. Dedication
  4. Epigraph
  5. PART I
  6. Chapter One
  7. Chapter Two
  8. Chapter Three
  9. Chapter Four
  10. Chapter Five
  11. Chapter Six
  12. Chapter Seven
  13. PART II
  14. Chapter Eight
  15. Chapter Nine
  16. Chapter Ten
  17. Chapter Eleven
  18. Chapter Twelve
  19. Chapter Thirteen
  20. Chapter Fourteen
  21. Chapter Fifteen
  22. Chapter Sixteen
  23. Chapter Seventeen
  24. PART III
  25. Chapter Eighteen
  26. Chapter Nineteen
  27. Chapter Twenty
  28. Chapter Twenty-one
  29. Chapter Twenty-two
  30. Chapter Twenty-three
  31. Chapter Twenty-four
  32. Chapter Twenty-five
  33. Chapter Twenty-six
  34. PART IV
  35. Chapter Twenty-seven
  36. Chapter Twenty-eight
  37. Chapter Twenty-nine
  38. Chapter Thirty
  39. Chapter Thirty-one
  40. Chapter Thirty-two
  41. Chapter Thirty-three
  42. Chapter Thirty-four
  43. Chapter Thirty-five
  44. PART V
  45. Chapter Thirty-six
  46. Chapter Thirty-seven
  47. Chapter Thirty-eight
  48. Chapter Thirty-nine
  49. Chapter Forty
  50. AUTHOR’S NOTE
  51. Readers Guide
  52. DISCUSSION QUESTIONS
  53. Acknowledgments
  54. About the Author
  55. What’s next onyour reading list?

The sermon bidding farewell to Clarence Goodall was punctuated with a lot of lively input from the audience—I mean, the congregation—sobs, sniffles, laughter, shouts of Amen! The pastor was vivacious and mobile and spoke at length and lovingly of Clarence’s devotion to duty, never mentioning that that duty was to a white family. He didn’t mention the Greenes at all. He spoke of how Clarence had been a good father not only to his own children, but to his fatherless nieces and nephews as well, how his innate dignity touched and inspired everyone who knew him. I got misty listening to him tell Clarence’s story as though it were a film unfolding, with certain peaks where he cued the musicians, and they played a few bars of something stirring, exactly like a movie soundtrack. Perhaps Terrence’s church and mine weren’t so very far apart after all.

“At the end of his life Clarence Goodall was an example of Christian fortitude amid the woes of the flesh,” said the pastor, “which he met with unshaken faith and the hope of resurrection, and he surely has been admitted to a glorious heaven, where the righteous will be forgiven their sins, and rewarded for their strength of spirit, and shine forever in the light of Almighty God. Amen.”

He nodded to a deacon and they closed the casket. I was so far at the back, I could see none of this, but I heard someone, a woman, break out in anguished sobs.

We stood for the closing hymn, “Amazing Grace,” and six men stepped from the pews and moved to Clarence Goodall’s coffin. They lifted it onto their shoulders and started up the aisle. One of these men at the front of the coffin was Booker. His face, when he saw me, turned to a granite mask of anger. And one of these men was Terrence. I had no idea he was back, and my heart raced, filled with Hallelujah! just to see him. As our eyes locked, Terrence’s expression swiftly fluttered with a range of emotions I cannot describe. When he had passed by I found the verse in the hymnal, and I let my voice soar, though I knew I shouldn’t be joyous at a funeral.